Reproducibility of deep learning in digital pathology whole slide image analysis

For a method to be widely adopted in medical research or clinical practice, it needs to be reproducible so that clinicians and regulators can have confidence in its use. Machine learning and deep learning have a particular set of challenges around reproducibility. Small differences in the settings or the data used for training a model can lead to large differences in the outcomes of experiments. In this work, three top-performing algorithms from the Camelyon grand challenges are reproduced using only information presented in the associated papers and the results are then compared to those reported. Seemingly minor details were found to be critical to performance and yet their importance is difficult to appreciate until the actual reproduction is attempted. We observed that authors generally describe the key technical aspects of their models well but fail to maintain the same reporting standards when it comes to data preprocessing which is essential to reproducibility. As an important contribution of the present study and its findings, we introduce a reproducibility checklist that tabulates information that needs to be reported in histopathology ML-based work in order to make it reproducible.Author summary: For a method to be used a lot in medical research or clinical practice, it needs to be able to be reproduced so that people can trust it. Machine learning and deep learning have some challenges around this. For example, small changes in how a model is trained can lead to significant changes in the results of experiments. This makes it essential that researchers report how they do things in enough detail for the results of their experiments to be reproducible. In this work, we looked at three different algorithms used for digital pathology image analysis. We tried to reproduce them using only the information reported in their papers. We confirmed that even minor details could be essential. Authors often do not report all the details needed to reproduce their work. We also created a checklist of things that need to be reported to help other researchers make their work reproducible.